CPI introduction:

This is precisely what Rejal is now doing. [CPI note: Former Berita Harian group editor Ahmad Rejal Arbee wrote an article titled 'Rakyat patriotik patut bangga bertutur guna bahasa Melayu' on Feb 3].

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Language and national patriotism: Utusan's and Berita Harian's Divisive Role

Clive Kessler

The Malay language will only achieve its formal constitutional status and long-intended national cultural and political standing when it becomes — when it is allowed to become, one must now say — the medium of modern, sophisticated communication and intellectual exchange between cosmopolitan Malaysian citizens.

Alas, all the efforts of Utusan Malaysia and Berita Harian continue unrelentingly to push the Malay language in exactly the opposite direction.

By the day Malay becomes ever more pronouncedly, especially thanks to Utusan’s strenuous political atavism, the language and political medium of a narrow, beleaguered attitude, a parochial outlook, a resentment-charged ethno-nationalist sectarianism.

Its agenda-setters and headline-writers see themselves as unimpeachable nationalists. But Utusan’s “language-politics” is not national and inclusive but sectional, exclusive and divisive.

We Malays, its political line contends, must defend the Malay language as a political icon.

Ever strengthened by our championing of its cause, it will in turn become our strong political bulwark and weapon, and our moral and symbolic bludgeon, against those who dare question, as we see it, the Malay stake in the country, or in other words the permanent categorical political primacy of the Malays among, and over, the nation’s diverse citizenry.

This is precisely what Rejal is now doing. That is the effect, if not the explicit and intended purpose, of his proposals. He would use the Malay language to establish a kind of “citizenship loyalty test” to which, under present political conditions, many non-Malay citizens of good conscience cannot happily submit and in which (along, let it be said, with the vast majority of the nation’s Malay citizens) they are in the main doomed to fail.

This is precisely not the way to ensure that the Malay language will become the living, enabling medium of a genuinely modern Malaysian culture in which all Malaysian citizens, regardless of cultural background, can happily participate, the shared and jointly nourished “cultural space” where they may mutually engage in an inclusive Malaysian “national conversation”.

Are these the views of a “clueless” and meddling outsider? Not really. They were the views, developed with great insight and advanced over an entire lifetime with an always impressive subtlety, by the late Rustam A. Sani.

Rustam died, far too young, some three years ago. The nation is, in today’s troubled times, sorely in need of his characteristic humanity, wisdom and thoughtfulness.

But for his sake, I am glad — a part of me is, anyway — that he is not alive now to see what has become of his ideals and of Malaysia’s still evolving nationhood as their testing-ground.

In his last book, so poignantly published and launched in the week after his death in 2008, he dared his fellow citizens to prove him wrong in entertaining the temptation to see Malaysia as “A Failed Nation”.

There is nothing wrong with Rustam’s ideals. The nation has simply failed the test.

It is time for people, and especially the Malay press and all who take its lead, to do better.

When they do, only when they do and not before, will they be in any moral position to contemplate setting cultural and linguistic citizenship and “entitlement” tests to their other fellow citizens.

You cannot ask others to join — to live up to the ideals of, and so make possible — a nation whose essential preconditions one fails oneself to uphold; one whose urgent and long-overdue political coalescence, by one’s own determined efforts, one continues to frustrate and impede.

This is the challenge today facing the champions of the Malay language — not the retributive and pre-emptive establishment of the language-based national “gatekeeping” devices that some are now so eager, yet again after so many earlier and quite predictable failures, to impose.

The Malay language in Malaysia faces two possible futures.

One is to be the generously hospitable “grounding space” for a diverse yet inclusive Malaysian nation, of an integrated national community that has yet to coalesce and take shape.

The other is to serve as the barrier and shield of an embattled and, by its own choice, beleaguered enclave — of an adamantly irreconcilable core or rump — against the coalescence of such a broad national community.

What do people want? What does Rejal Arbee? What, in general, does the Malay press? And what, as its political “pace-maker” and agenda-setter, does Utusan?

On this central question, the nation’s Malay citizenry are not, as Utusan fears and likes to claim, sidelined, mere spectators.

On the contrary, on this fateful national issue the future is in Malay hands, especially those of Utusan and its political masters.



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* "Clive S. Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia."

This is a revised version of a commentary which first appeared in the Malaysian Insider on Feb 4, 2010.